Signs of life in some of the oldest rocks

For decades the record of tangible signs of life extended back to around 3.4 billion years ago, in the form of undulose, banded biofilms of calcite known as stromatolites preserved at North Pole in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. There have been attempts to use carbon-isotope data and those of other elements from older, unfossiliferous rocks to seek chemical signs of living processes that extracted carbon from the early seas. Repeatedly, claims have been made for such signatures being extracted from the 3.7 to 3.8 Ga Isua metasediments in West Greenland. But because this famous locality shows evidence of repeated metamorphism abiogenic formation of the chemical patterns cannot be ruled out. Isua has been literally crawled over since Vic McGregor of the Greenland Geological Survey became convinced in the 1960s that the metasediments could be the oldest rocks in the world, a view confirmed eventually by Stephen Moorbath and Noel Gale of Oxford University using Rb-Sr isotopic dating. There are slightly older rocks in Canada, which just break the 4 Ga barrier, but they were metamorphose at higher pressures and temperatures and are highly deformed. The Isua suprcrustals, despite deformation and metamorphism show far more diversity that geochemically can be linked to many kinds of sedimentary and volcanic rock types.

Two of the Isua addicts are Allen Nutman of the University of Wollongong, Australia and Clark Friend formerly of Oxford Brookes University, UK, who have worked together on many aspects of the Isua rocks for decades. Finally, thanks to melt-back of old snow pack, they and colleagues have found stromatolites that push the origin of life as far back as it seems possible for geoscientists to reach (Nutman, A.P. et al. 2016. Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures. Nature, v. 537, published online 31 August 2016, doi:10.1038/nature). The trace fossils occur in a marble, formerly a limestone that retains intricate sedimentary structures, which show it to have been deposited in shallow water. The carbon and oxygen isotopes have probably been disturbed by metamorphism, and no signs of cell material remain for the same reason, but the shape is sufficiently distinct from those produced by purely sedimentary processes to suspect that they resulted from biofilm build-up. The fact that they are made of carbonates suggests that they may have been produced by cyanobacteria as modern stromatolites are.

Stromatolite-like structures from a metasediment in the Isua area of West Greenland (credit Allen Nutman, University of Wollongong, Australia)

The age of the structures, about 3.7 Ga, is close to the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment (4. 1to 3.8 Ga) of the Solar System by errant asteroids and comets. So, if the physical evidence is what it seems to be, life emerged either very quickly after such an energetic episode or conditions at the end of the Hadean were not inimical to living processes or the prebiotic chemistry that led to them.